Cisco Predicts 3.1 million DDoS Attacks by 2021

Cisco recently said that Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks will continue to rise in the next five years. It has also predicted that these attacks will steadily increase in magnitude, approaching 1.2 Gbps or more, and take most of the companies totally offline.

These attacks disabled networks by submerging network devices and servers from various IP sources and grew by 172% in 2016. In Cisco’s annual networking chain, the number of attacks has increased from 2.5 to 3.1 million globally by 2021. The statistics are collected from the 12th edition of Cisco’s annual networking and Internet trends forecast, Visual Networking Index.

In the recent years, DDoS attacks have peaked, and have increased by almost 60 percent. These attacks have increased total internet traffic up to 18 percent, at the time of occurrence, according to recent reports.The attack size increased to 22 percent, as Internet traffic is relatively the same over the years.

In one of his recent blog post, Thomas Barnett, Jr., Director of Thought Leadership, Cisco said- “The forecast shows a comprehensive security strategy is key to a company’s survival and profitability: Various levels of protection (hardware and software) are required to prevent network breaches and to protect private records and data.”

The forecast was preceded by an initiative by Cisco in the later half of the last month to venture into the Internet of Things (IoT) security market, alongside its IoT Threat Defense cyber security architecture. This is not a brand new product, but a combination of Cisco’s existing security services and software, merged together, in order to target IoT security.